


come as you are

by basset_voyager



Series: BLACK WIDOW STORIES [3]
Category: Marvel 616, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Natasha-centric, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, bits of 616
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-27
Updated: 2015-05-27
Packaged: 2018-04-01 11:06:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,779
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4017415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/basset_voyager/pseuds/basset_voyager
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natasha has dozens of stories about how she got every scar on her body - some true, some not. If there's anything Natasha Romanoff has in abundance, it's scars and bullshit.</p>
            </blockquote>





	come as you are

As a rule, Natasha never lets anyone see the worst of her scars. If she has to wear a bathing suit on a job, she’ll cover the gunshot scars on her calf and shoulder with waterproof concealer and wear a one-piece that hides the knot on her abdomen and the burn on her lower back. For the more minor scars, she has a dozen stories to explain each one away - “Took a dive off my bike,” “Nearly cut off my finger chopping onions,” or “My father, he had a temper.” Men in particular accept these explanations without question. She’s never had an issue with somebody not believing her.

It’s another in a long list of reasons that it pisses Natasha off when people assume she sleeps with marks. Even if she wanted to, it would undermine her. Her body does not look innocent. Part of Natasha is waiting for some injury that will take her out of the game entirely, the missing limb or the slash across her face that doesn’t heal properly and takes away her best defense. Sometimes she thinks it might be a relief. Mostly she thinks it’ll be the cue for death to finally catch up with her. She’s never told anybody about that fear, not even Clint or Sharon or Matt. It’s a basic rule of what she does. Keep your fear to yourself and nobody can use it against you. 

“Yeah,” she tells Steve, before he launches her onto a flying alien chariot. “It’ll be fun.” He has no scars. Every injury he gets heals over with new, perfect skin as if it never happened. She wonders if he had marks on his body before the serum, childhood scars from chickenpox or kitchen mishaps or one too many fistfights. It occurs to her that he might miss them, but she doesn’t ask about it. 

When Natasha looks in the mirror, sometimes her scars seem like the only parts of her body that are really hers. It gives her a strange, carsick sort of feeling and she has to look away. 

If Natasha had a dollar for every time she told herself to get her shit together she’d never have to work again. Although she’d probably end up getting killed by a robot assassin from outer space anyway so it doesn’t really matter. 

“Crashed my bicycle in sixth grade,” Natasha tells a corporate exec that the CIA suspects of having had dealings with AIM. She displays the small scar on her elbow from when she got thrown from a balcony during a mission in Bosnia. “Had to wear a cast for six weeks.” 

“Did it make you afraid to ride again?” the man asks. He hand creeps closer to her knee. Natasha smiles. 

“No,” she says. “You can’t let something like that stop you.” 

Guy turns out to be clean. Well, as clean as he could be. 

Natasha rarely lies about her scars when there’s not a good reason to. Occasionally, she will tell a SHIELD rookie some ridiculous story about having been stabbed in the gut by a clone of Elvis, just to see if they’ll believe it. Other times, she’ll tell the truth just to see if they won’t. 

“With all due respect, ma’am,” says the operative running point for her, a kid who looks no older than twenty. “But the guys warned me that you like to fuck with people. I know the Winter Soldier is a myth.” 

“Alright,” she replies. “You got me.” 

It feels good to ride her motorcycle down the highway as fast as she can make it go until the tires wear out. It feels good to feel the weight of a gun in her hand, good to fire. It feels good to make someone else bleed. Cause and effect. Quantifiable. Honest. She hates painkillers because they dull things, make them hazy and doubtful. Real things are supposed to hurt. They’re supposed to leave marks, a trail of evidence. The scar exists even if how it got there is obscured in a cloud of bullshit. If there’s anything that Natasha has in abundance, it’s scars and bullshit. 

Sam texts her like she’s a friend, asking her about whether she saw the game last night and if she wants him to pick her up some coffee on the way to the tower. Natasha really has to stop making friends that she actually likes. They expect her to be the same person today as she was when they saw her last week. Weird. Unreasonable, really. 

“You ever get so angry it scares you?” Matt asks her one day while he’s holding the punching bag for her. She frowns at him for a second, unable to overcome the instinct that he’s trying to get something out of her. Then she goes back to counting her punches. 

“Me too,” he says. 

She’s envious of Matt and his faith, how he can just step into a confessional and unburden himself of everything. Be clean and new. She suspects it probably isn’t that simple, but it’s a comforting concept. Natasha doesn’t believe in God - can’t take the Soviet Union out of the girl, she likes to tell people. Most of them drop the subject after that, and it spares her from having to make up some elaborate story to avoid the fact that she wishes that she could. 

Sometimes, when Sharon smiles at her, Natasha turns to look over her shoulder expecting to see someone else. 

She goes on a mission to take down a sex trafficking ring in Texas. When they find the leader, she bloodies her knuckles beating him and tells her team she ran out of ammo. It’s close enough to true. 

“You ever get so angry it scares you?” she asks Sam. 

“Yeah,” he answers, unsurprised by the question. “Usually I find something cushy I can hit.” 

SHIELD collapses and so do all of Natasha’s covers. For the next few months, she waits for the moment when she’ll start being herself, but it never comes. Anyone she doesn’t know very well and her fallback personas come up like steel walls. Flirty coed Natasha. Empty-headed malleable Natasha. Stoic agent Natasha. It starts making her dizzy after a while. She goes to the shooting range and empties a clip into the target and it doesn’t ask her any questions. 

The week Peggy Carter dies, Sharon asks her if she wants to go for a drive. They head out of the city with the top down, and Sharon drives twenty miles over the speed limit the whole way. Sharon turns on the radio and they fight over it for a while, eventually settling on some fuzzy classic rock station that they have turn up all the way to hear over the wind. Come evening, they end up on some deserted beach in New Jersey covered in shells and broken glass. Natasha spreads her jacket out on a rock and they sit watching the sunset, passing a bottle of scotch back and forth. It’s a beautiful night, the kind you should be savoring to remember when you’re elderly and sick and cold. 

“If I see one more son of a bitch on the news even say the word ‘Hydra’ in the same sentence as her name,” Sharon spits. She doesn’t have to finish. 

“I’ll clear a path for you,” Natasha replies. 

“Cheers to that,” Sharon says, raising the bottle. 

They sit in silence for a while, watching the sun go pink and red as it dips below the water. 

“I don’t think she ever trusted me,” Natasha admits. “I mean, I don’t blame her. I wouldn’t trust me either.” 

Sharon smiles. “She liked you, though. I think that’s more important.” 

“Do you trust me?” Natasha finds herself asking, and immediately starts kicking herself for making this about her when Sharon has just lost someone so important. Sharon doesn’t seem fazed, though. 

“With my life,” she replies. 

Natasha scoffs despite herself. “Don’t bullshit me.” 

“I’m not,” Sharon insists. “What do you want me to say? That you could turn out to have been working for Hydra all along at any moment? Sure, you could, but so could I. And anyway, I’m trusting you not to, and I’m far too cute to disappoint.” She gives Natasha a dimpled smile. Natasha rolls her eyes. 

“You should try that strategy next time you’re cornered on an op,” she says. “Sorry, bad guys, I’m far too cute to kill.” 

They fall asleep huddled underneath Natasha’s jacket. Natasha wakes up in the middle of the night and looks up at the stars, remembering her mother’s finger tracing the constellations in a Russian winter sky a hundred lifetimes ago. She wonders where Peggy Carter is, if she’s in the Heaven that Matt believes in or the warrior paradise of Thor’s people or just in the ground. They say her legacy is a smoldering wreck, a house built on rotting foundations. Natasha looks at Sharon and thinks of Steve and Trip and Nick and decides that you should never trust rumors. Things that are real leave a mark, a trail of evidence. They don’t end, not really. 

“Maybe your problem,” Clint says one day out of the blue, “isn’t that you don’t know who you are, but that you think that other people do. Nobody knows shit, comes right down to it.” 

“Maybe your problem is that you need to shut up,” she replies, and continues diffusing the bomb. 

Natasha has dozens of stories about how she got every scar on her body, some true, some not. Her favorite is the one where she fell down in the snow as a child and gashed open her hand on a jagged rock that was buried underneath, and her father came to carry her inside. In the story, he stitches up the wound himself, humming to distract her from the pain. In fact, there isn’t really any pain at all. She looks outside at the droplets of her blood dotting the white snow, and her father tells her that it will make roses grow. 

This is a story she tells herself. 

Real things hurt. They leave marks. Natasha looks at her hand and sees a jagged line, the remnant of the clumsy stitches of a young soldier who’d only ever watched a medic do this before. 

Natasha wraps her hands in cloth and punches a bag until the seam rips. 

“Hey, how’d you get that scar?” slurs a college boy the next time she lets Sharon drag her out to a bar. 

Natasha smiles at him, her best most private smirk. 

“None of your fucking business,” she purrs, and leaves him standing there.

**Author's Note:**

> though this is part of my nat fic series, it doesn't share continuity with "outside of nowhere" or even necessarily with "where you must first belong." it's just another story about natasha.


End file.
